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Trump adviser Navarro defends US response in angry CBS interview
Navarro challenges 60 Minutes over pandemic preparedness
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/13/peter-navarro-trump-coronavirus-cbs-60-minutes?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Trump’s coronavirus tsar Peter Navarro defended the administration’s pandemic response on CBS on Sunday night, angrily challenging his hosts to show him how they had covered pandemic preparations under previous administrations.
So 60 Minutes did.
“I challenge you,” said Navarro, “show me the 60 Minutes episode a year ago, two years ago, or during the Obama administration, during the Bush administration that said, ‘Hey, global pandemic’s coming, you gotta do X, Y and Z, and, by the way, we gotta shut down the economy to fight it.
“Show me that episode. Then you’ll have some credence in terms of attacking the Trump administration for not being prepared.”
60 Minutes duly ran clips from a 2009 feature on the fight against H1N1, or swine flu – “a pandemic, meaning it’s a global epidemic, the first flu pandemic in 41 years” – and a 2005 section on H5N1, or avian flu, which the show said had “the potential to cause an influenza pandemic similar to the one that killed 50 million people in 1918”.
The 2005 piece included an interview with Dr Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who is now a leading public health expert in the Trump White House, under increasing fire from the president.
“I don’t see it as an exercise because it could be the big one,” Fauci said then, of preparations being pursued by the federal government. “It could be, and if it is our rushing around doing what we need to do, pushing the envelope is not for nought or in vain.”